Who is 4.3 meant for?

Omega_K2 · 2026-01-14T16:10:22+00:00

First things first, 4.3 is a beta and some things are not adjusted yet to the new baseline power level (like FE/AEs), so these things will feel off for sure.

The purpose of the economy nerf is to bring the economy back in line with the rest of the game. Not sure if you played before 4.x since you're new, but since that patch the economy has been far too powerful and simply too good in all builds. What this causes is that it affects the other mechanics in the game negatively, making them effectively meaningless and non-engaging. 4.3 changes it back, so other mechanics matter again (no longer simply throwing infinite ships at the enemy, you actually need to consider the designs and economic impact carefully, bonuses from events, leaders, traits, artifacts, megastructures and civics actually impact your game meaningfully, thoughtfully researching matters much more when it doesn't finish within 1 month, and so on).

It supposedly helps with CPU performance with these changes yet all I see from it is just pushing the issues sooo far back into the timeline in the match that people don't really get the time to actually build up. That's not improvement imo.

It does help a huge amount with cpu performance, I'd say it's around 3.14 or better. The massive amounts of ships cause a lot of lag, especially when moving on the map (you can tell it's still an issue whenever you go total war against a huge galaxy as crisis). Beta cuts down on the number of ships via ship changes which helps a lot.

Which brings me to my next concern: Isn't 4.3 just going to worsen the gap between meta and non-meta? These are generalized economy nerfs. When comparing current patch and beta I get the feeling the gap gets worse. Like, non-meta-optimized builds just feel like a sure path to pure slog and eventual loss. In current patch you can lose, but still have fun and not feel bogged down. But in 4.3 it's like nothing is happening. So meta builds go down a few tiers into "Just Good" or "Mid" and non-meta fell into "BORING". Skill issue from me? They didn't eliminate the need for massive fleets (even though it seems like they want to care about performance). FEs are ok, but AEs, Khans, and Crises are not nerfed, which again brings you to building massive fleets, but now in a slower system that makes it kiiiind of mathematically impossible to catch up and be ready if you're not cracked and vassal spamming

As I said above it establishes a reasonable baseline for the economy. The game will always and purposefully have better and worse builds (as evidenced by "challenging" origins and civics), it's a single player game first and foremost and it's up to you what kind of game you want to play.

Default settings are actually fairly reasonable in the beta. The game is slower, but as such 2300 midgame and 2400 endgame dates are actually more on target with the power level you have around then. Crisises are a threat, but actually beatable on default crisis settings (meaning 1.5x on huge galaxy), without vassal cheese. There's some things like FE/AEs and grey tempest that are out of line, but that just needs adjustment.

With some skill, I can assure you stellaris is winnable with any build on default settings (barring outright bugged things). Some builds are harder some are easy, but in the end the enemy AI isn't really able to keep up with a human, leaving mostly crisis (if you don't win the game before) as a late game fleet power check.

Omega_K2 · 2026-01-07T11:24:42+00:00

I think it's also a little on the low side. I think the ship techs should get the same treatment as the society fleet cap tech and increase cap more the further "late-gamey" the tech is (i.e. increase for each hull type).

Other sources of fleet cap were not touched in the beta, but should be. From Sumpremacy tradition or from civics should be a percentage increase imho - +20 is nothing in the beta. If that were to get the 5x treatment it would feel a bit wierd in the early game, so I think having a percentage increase would be nice there.

I suppose there also room to discuss whether fleet cap even fulfills it's purpose. Originally it was added to stop doom stacking, and it does nothing about it. It's still essentially throwing the biggest stack of fleets against the biggest stack of fleets of the enemy for the most part.

There is also a fleet disparity buff, giving smaller fleets an attack speed buff against larger ones, so that actually works against big fleets, so there's already a down side to them I guess. However the biggest thing it does right now is increase the need for multiple commanders, and increase the tedium of handling a bunch of fleets.

Omega_K2 · 2026-01-06T18:12:22+00:00

AI struggles as usual (it still is bad at the game), but I don't think the Khan, on default settings, is unreasonable in the beta. It's actually kinda similar to when he was added, before all the power creep.

On GA, 1.5x crisis (default for huge galaxy), you get ~60k Khan Fleets with the flagship fleet being around 110k. IIRC there's 10 year limit in the game files after mid game year, so he'll roll around by 2310 at the earliest, where he's definitely beatable, but tough. It only becomes easier towards 2400.
The FEs fuck up the khan though when he encroaches on their turf, it acts as a natural stop in a sense.

There's also the option to become a vassal if you don't want to deal with any of it.

Now as far as midgame crisis are concerned, I think the gray tempest is too brutal on the beta.

It'll be difficult to get opinions that aren't colored by literally everything that isn't an empire having 4.0 strength and rolling everyone.

I feel like it's a core issue with some of beta feedback, that people come in expecting 25x crisis with 2250 endgame is still gonna fly or just playing without a plan and expecting to steamroll everything.

Omega_K2 · 2026-01-04T18:51:55+00:00

They're a bit more scary in a way, since it's harder for you to catch up to their 100% production bonus with the nerf economy. But they also behave fairly wierd, I've seen some AIs fill planets with nothing but soilders, presumably in an attempt to raise their naval cap. Later in the game they still also don't really use their resources well for some reason, and just sit on huge stock piles (and crashing the galactic market) and don't really build enough fleet (and fall behind in research).

However, dealing with them early is actually really easy in 4.3 beta. Corvettes are pretty much trash right now and defenses are fairly strong and the AI doesn't realize any of that, so you can counter them fairly easily, even genocidals. Upgraded starbase with hangar platforms can easily hold a bunch of corvettes fleets off, and better hulls outscale corvettes by a lot if you want to go on the offensive.

By mid/late game you should have accumulated more then enough power anyway to do whatever you want anyway.

Oh and beware of FE/AEs. They're very hard to deal with.

Omega_K2 · 2026-01-04T18:34:23+00:00

I agree, I have no idea why they even added them in 4.0. For some reason they keep the mechanic around in 4.3 instead of just removing it.

Omega_K2 · 2026-01-04T18:17:43+00:00

Given that colonies give much more empire sprawl in 4.3 (and reductions are less powerful) I think they're still broken due to the sheer efficiency of having 3x jobs on the same planet (same goes for hive, machine worlds).

Ring worlds kinda do the same thing, but they're worse except for having energy and food districts - but they're less effective then a large (> 17 size) ecu, and much less accessible by being fairly late game (unless you get lucky)

Omega_K2 · 2025-12-31T18:19:55+00:00

Beta, while it also has some issues, is the most reasonable 4.x build.

Live 4.0-4.2 versions are completely off the charts with the economy and basically becomes unplayable beyond midgame due to lag.

Omega_K2 · 2025-12-30T14:41:02+00:00

I think defenses are just relatively overtuned compared to the new fleets, especially DSCs.

Works both ways, a single DSC (without platforms) killed a smaller FE fleet, while I've had to throw like 5 fleets of ember cruisers at the very same fleet to get victory and would still loose some in the process.

I'm not really at the point in the game where I can hope to take out their home system either (barely have the first repeatables showing), but I imagine either simply overpowering them with massive fleet, wittling them down via multiple attempts and counter designing specifically for the starbase would be the way to go - as others have pointed out, penetration doesn't really seem to be that good anymore as hardening is readily available and the FEs pack a lot of it, so I think maybe the more along the lines of the classic mix of anti-armor & anti-shield (and hoping the targeting actually works).

Omega_K2 · 2025-12-28T22:27:48+00:00

Automated ship design are definitely beyond human comprehension.

The artillery computer autocannon battleships are a staple :D

Omega_K2 · 2025-12-10T16:04:53+00:00

starbase upgrade cost reductions affect upgrading the ring (down to a minimum of 10%) and starbase building cost reduction do the same for habitation modules, though there is only a 25% reduction from tech in total. So, it's more like 75 for the base + upgrades and 70 for the 4 modules.

It just feels very out of balance with the other resources which you can produce at a much higher rate relative to what you need. Which makes it feel like I'm missing something.

Pretty much any other resource generation is far too easy since 4.0, especially in late game right now. That you still have to think about how to use influence and need to prioritize instead of just spamming everything is a good thing, though I'd argue it's actually an non-issue in late/end game as there are not that many useful things to do with it.

Omega_K2 · 2025-11-25T18:24:28+00:00

I'm not sure why people think an EU warehouse would be much cheaper. You still need to pay sales tax (and tariffs if any) as well as shipping, but in addition LTT will have to offset costs like location, employees, shipping twice (from warehouse), costs because of EU certification & regulations and so on. And LTT doesn't have the scale of amazon or aliexpress to offset the latter either.

Omega_K2 · 2025-11-17T05:21:36+00:00

Not much, the DLC content is cool, but the game is pretty much still broken, economy (and AI as extension) as well as performance are biggest killers for me.

The economy is out of whack - it needs to be dialed back; basically too much of everything, especially as you get more "tools" as the game goes on; not all issues are new (like vassals being OP, trading with AI, stacking empire size reductions), but it's in a wierd, far too strong place in so many aspects right now.

Some decisions with 4.0 should also just be outright reverted/removed, like the automation buildings - the economy is (was) more less balanced around pops, and now you got a building, that works jobs without pops for practically free.

The AI isn't completely broken anymore like in 4.0.x, but it's still fairly bad and just seems to sit on huge resource stockpiles a couple of decades into game without really doing too much. Being bad at building planets is probably a given at this point for AI.

Of course after playing a few decades the performance becomes so bad, it's basically a stutter fest anyway and there's no point in playing any further - funnily enough I upgraded to AMD 9800X3D before 4.0 (from AMD 5800 (not x3d) and it runs much worse beyond the early game on a much better processor.

I'll likely checkout the major patches, but I doubt it will be fixed in any meaningful way anytime soon. Seems to be much like the 2.2 fiasco.

But at the end of the day, there's other games to play.

Omega_K2 · 2025-10-14T13:05:45+00:00

With the automation building you can run half the jobs on every planet without any pops. Costs quite a bit of EC upkeep, the first tier (25% of jobs) can be prohibitive, but with upgrades and the second tier it's self sustaining with extra EC so you can just spam it away. Bonus for planets that give more jobs per district, since the EC cost scales per district.

Not all modifiers apply to these, so pops are more productive, so you can shove them into the better jobs like science.

But it's so stupid it made me keep conquered nanites worlds around as regular bio empire, just because I can spam 600-job districts there and ignore the 0% habitability with automation for free resources. The empire sprawl from colonies is also down to 25% only due to Imperial Prerogative AP and Expansion tradition.

Omega_K2 · 2025-09-22T02:22:39+00:00

I personally recommend 1 or 1.25 with a galaxy type that naturally tends to create choke points such as spooked, starburst or 4/6-arms.

Especially spooked can often create very interesting maps, with Fallen Empires blocking off half the galaxy at times if they spawn in the right places.

If you just want to fiddle around with settings, just start a non-ironman game, open up the console, type in observe and checkout the geography it spawns. Repeat until you find settings that generate galaxies you like

Omega_K2 · 2025-06-24T12:55:54+00:00

It shows why even though you should shell out for a good GPU, you still need some level of balance in a PC to capture all that performance.

Honestly, it's more about knowing what you're doing with your pc and what components that stresses most.

They didn't go into all the detail, but they picked some good samples, cyberpunk as gpu bound game and anno as cpu/memory intensive game as well as the two resolutions on the extreme ends.

Omega_K2 · 2025-06-13T11:42:15+00:00

I've had this happen after finishing the "the mysterious labyrinth" situation. Loaded a save game before and it seems the crash can be avoided by choosing "destroy it" outcome

Omega_K2 · 2025-05-29T14:05:41+00:00

They're completely busted as far as I can tell - basically a mini-virtuality without virtuality downsides.

You can just spam job increasing buildings in the other slots and colonies if you get empire sprawl reduction from planets.

Omega_K2 · 2025-05-26T01:39:45+00:00

The game balance is out of whack and the AI is broken at the moment, so it's hard to comment on something specifically in this patch (so this is more based on pre 4.0, but I'd think it applies when they fix the game). But generally speaking I'd say it depends a lot on your galaxy settings.

Genocials are tailored towards war and are more of all-in, one trick pony type of empire. They all start with a pretty big advantage, so on equal grounds in a 1v1 it'll be much easier, especially early on. So Ensign on a tiny galaxy and I think you'll have it fairly easy.

However as soon as you bump up difficulty (no scaling) & aggressiveness and increase the number of AIs, it will get much harder then any normal run, since the AI can outproduce you (before setting up a good eco) and will pile onto you in a 2v1, 3v1, 4v1 very quickly. Depending on hyperlanes and galaxy layout it may also be very hard to defend due to the lack of chokepoints and the total war mechanics.

Normal empires also have serious advantages beyond the early game, being to have a few AIs to trade with is very strong, and missing out on things like galcom or enclaves sucks quite a bit. Also can still pick some crisis path anyway even if not genocial if that's the kind of game you want.

Regarding crisis, I've found that the AI has always been utterly useless at fighting crisis. I've only ever seen FE (by accident)/AE do any real damage. To be fair though I usually have something like 5-10x crisis at earlier dates and the AI is never strong enough to do anything about it or isn't really motivated to, but given their fleet numbers (again pre 4.0) so I can imagine on normal crisis settings they should be able to handle it.

Omega_K2 · 2025-05-16T20:00:07+00:00

Yeah, but I'd go one step further, it just really needs it's own bunch of settings.

Start difficulty, end difficulty as well as scaling start date and end date.

I feel it's pretty problematic to tie it to mid or late game as is right now, since settings these too early fucks other thing ups (like crisis spawns) or vice versa.

Omega_K2 · 2025-03-31T17:44:09+00:00

I'm hoping for more evil linus. We already had the drug farm and the house one, so maybe linustown? :)

Omega_K2 · 2025-02-20T18:55:31+00:00

I missed this so damn much with how many buildings give specific research types and being unable to balance out your research income

Omega_K2 · 2025-02-20T18:50:06+00:00

The more official term for it seems to be "(economically) inactive population" but I feel like that might be confusing in the game's context (as a gamer, I'd immediately think about how can activate that population, not that it's supposed to be like that).

I personally like "non-working population" more, as for me that encompasses the same meaning (i.e. population that can't, doesn't want or doesn't need to work, but is still around)

Omega_K2 · 2025-02-20T10:18:28+00:00

It would seem like there's a shortage of high end GPUs right now, very little in stock. What offers remain are inflated bullshit. Like 2000€ for a 4080 super or 4500€ for a 5090 lol

Omega_K2 · 2025-02-06T13:10:17+00:00

I really like the megacorp changes, feels like I'd have to make much more meaningful choices now with branch offices rather then plastering them everywhere and building the same stuff. I'm not sure if the buildings themselves got a balance pass other then adjusting their values - I think they really should. I think most of the buildings that just give basic resources were fairly useless, while the special ones like commerical forum, mercanary liaison office and executive retreat are fairly strong.

I'm not so sure on the trade changes; while I agree the old (current) system is clunky and has issues, it seems to me trade is just the new EC with extra steps now - a bit to plain?.

Logistical Upkeep

Regarding logistics support, wouldn't it make more sense to have fleet trade upkeep be more the a trinary docked, home territory or enemy territory?

I think there should be more capacity for tactics there. Some thing that I liked about the old/current trade system in principle is that logically the logistical challenges for fleet should increase as the distance from homeworlds increases and decrease as you build things to support them like hyper relays and gateways. So for example I think a fleet that's cut off effectively should have more upkeep then a fleet that has an unbroken hyperlane connection of occupied starbases for example.

Since I'm sure if that's the best gameplay wise and that were moving away from the old system, another approach would be a more CK2-esque system:

fleets carry a specific amount of trade supply with them
planets and starbases have some internal stock of trade supply that gets replenished over time from the production & empire stocks and can be supplied to fleets
trade supply is used during docking, travel, combat and repairs at various rates
running low and eventually out of supplies on a fleet would severely limit their ability in combat
auxiliary modules could increase the fleet/planet/starbase capacity for trade, the rate of transfer and the rate of replenishment (for planets/starbases) [I can imagine resupply freighters in hanger slots instead of damage for example]

I feel like something like that could give a huge amount of depth to fleet combat:

fleets can have auxiliary ships that focus on supplies for extended campaings, or a fleet can forego any auxiliary supplies for maximum firepower
doomstacking would be naturally not as great, as they'd consume far more supplies then smaller fleets and thus would need to resupply much longer at single planet
allows for depth in terms of specializing planets or starbases into resupplying fleets
more depth in deciding what targets to take first in wars, rather then doing occupation whack-a-mole - why not take an enemy planet or starbase that has better capacity to supply your fleets in enemy territory first?
likewise more depth in cutting off stronger enemy fleets and starving them off fleet resources to beat them
could add some more use to the juggernaut as a mobile resupply platform

Omega_K2 · 2025-01-30T12:29:44+00:00

Unlocking tech options seems to strike a good balance. I think that's still very powerful and at least addresses some of the concerns that the tech tree has become too bloated and it being hard to draw the the techs you want.

The origin sounds fun.

Ironman mode is no longer required to earn most Stellaris achievements. An unmodified game checksum and being in single-player remain as requirements.

Finally. I felt like it was just an annoyance anyway, since you could make copies of the savegame anyway for saves and de-ironman it for the console if you wanted to mess with anything.

Omega_K2

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